Given its title and the Blu-ray’s cover art to your left, you might assume 2024’s Ride focuses on competitive rodeo athletes. While that arena acts as context, the film instead offers a family drama and not a story about “winning the big one”.

Peter Hawkins (Jake Allyn) serves four years in prison for vehicular manslaughter after his drug abuse led to a car accident that killed one and left his younger sister Virginia (Zia Carlock) injured. Now Virginia suffers from cancer and the family needs $40,000 to get her the necessary treatment.

To raise funds, Peter resumes his career as a bull rider, while his estranged father John (C. Thomas Howell) contemplates riskier measures. This eventually connects the family with drug dealer Tyler (Patrick Murney), a choice that comes with ample danger.

And ample clichés. While Ride offers a competent drama, it plods such predictable territory that it never emerges as anything memorable.

The film really does trade in tropes. None of the characters come across as anything fresh or deep, so we find ourselves with a fairly flat array of roles who fail to find much room to bloom.

Basic clichés at the heart of a movie don’t necessarily doom it. For instance, 2016’s Hell or High Water came with similarly trite notions and characters but it developed into an engrossing drama.

Ride never gets there, as it remains bogged down in its stock roles and themes. Even when it attempts to toss in a few twists, it doesn’t overcome its basic sense of Been There, Done That.

Again, none of this makes Ride a bad film, mainly because those involved execute the material fairly well. While it doesn’t equal the heights of High Water, it becomes a more than competent effort.

Unfortunately, Ride never rises above that level of “pretty decent”. Although the film delivers enough drama to keep us with it, the end result never becomes memorable.

Ride appears in an aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. Expect generally positive visuals here.

For the most part, sharpness appeared good. While the image occasionally felt a bit on the soft side during interiors or wider shots, the majority of the movie came across with acceptable to good delineation.

Jagged edges and moiré effects failed to appear. I also noticed neither edge haloes nor print flaws.

In terms of palette, Ride favored a standard mix of orange/amber and teal. These hues lacked much pep but they seemed more than adequate.

Blacks appeared full and dense, while low-light shots gave us good clarity. This didn’t become a great image, but it worked fine most of the time,

Though not packed with action, the film’s DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack accentuated the story. Most of the livelier moments related to rodeo elements, but even those didn’t manage to use the spectrum in an especially vivid manner.

The film emphasized ambience and not much more. A little violence popped up along the way in addition to the rodeo scenes, but not enough to make a real difference in the track’s overall impact.

Within those confines, sound quality satisfied. Music was full and rich, while effects demonstrated nice clarity and accuracy.

Speech came across as crisp and natural. The mix didn’t do much but it seemed acceptable.

Under Interviews with the Cast, we get seven segments. These involve actor/writer/director Jake Allyn (6:38), actor/writer Josh Plasse (6:05), and actors Annabeth Gish (11:27), C. Thomas Howell (10:13), Forrie J. Smith (9:06), Laci Kaye Booth (4:15) and Zia Carlock (3:32).

Much of the time, we hear about story, characters and performances. Allyn and Plasse expand a bit more into broader production areas as well.

That means Allyn and Plasse provide the most interesting notes. As for the actors, they give us a smattering of insights but tend to keep things fluffy.

The disc opens with ads for Sting, The Last Stop in Yuma County and Monolith. We also find the trailer for Ride.

As an exploration of desperation in the heartland, Ride becomes a watchable but unmemorable affair. It simply sticks with too many clichés and trite characters to turn into anything especially compelling. The Blu-ray gives us generally positive picture and audio as well as a smattering of bonus features. Expect a professional but somewhat flat affair here.